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Massacre in Guatemala: A survivor’s story

Ramiro Osorio Cristales was one of four survivors of the massacre at Dos Erres. He was eventually forced to call a man who helped kill his father ‘Papa.’

Ramiro Cristales, whose entire family and fellow villagers in Dos Erres, Guatemala, were killed by paramilitary forces when he was 5, poses for a photo in his Canadian apartment in June, 2011. He was raised by one of the killers until roughly the age of 17.
(JOHN WOODS / For the Toronto Star)

The Guatemalan military committed a host of massacres during the country's lengthy civil war. These bones, believed to come from a 10-year-old, were discovered during the exhumation of 76 villagers in Cocop in 2008. (Rodrigo Abd / The Associated Press)

Survivor of the Dos Erres massacre Oscar Alfredo Ramirez Castaneda, left, and his father Tranquilino Castaneda Valenzuela were reunited after being separated three decades ago when Oscar survived a massacre during Guatamala's civil war. (Steven Senne / ASSOCIATED PRESS)

"“They began to torture the men. We could hear their cries. A man entered the church and said if we knew how to pray, we should start to pray.”"

Ramiro Osorio Cristales

one of just four survivors

Ramiro Osorio Cristales was just 5 years old on the day the Earth stood still.

Now, 31 years later, he remembers the events of that day — Dec. 7, 1982 — with almost preternatural clarity.

When he speaks to a reporter on the phone, Osorio has only recently returned to Canada from a late-September journey to Riverside, Calif., where he testified as the final witness for the prosecution at the trial of Jorge Sosa Orantes, a former Guatemalan army officer and alleged war criminal.

“I don’t feel hate,” Osorio says. “I don’t live with hate.”

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He does live with sadness, however — sadness and a quantity of fear. Who in his place would not?

More than three decades after that grim day, Osorio agrees to tell his story on two conditions: that his Canadian hometown not be revealed, and that his wife and their two youngsters not be identified.

“I really feel a tremendous sadness. How can someone who is supposed to protect the people of Guatemala do a massacre of this magnitude?”

What follows is the story of three men — one, a survivor of war crimes; the other two, alleged war criminals — whose lives have continued to intersect over the years, ever since the Earth stood still one day in an Indian village called Dos Erres, in a remote region of northern Guatemala known as the Petén.

This is also a tale about the slow pace of justice, the long reach of memory, and the mysterious ways in which an atrocity’s horror can be tempered, at least a little, by time and hope.

Two of the men in this story are now Canadian citizens. They weren’t then.

A life changed forever

“It was at night,” says Osorio, as he recalls those terrifying hours when his life changed forever. “We had gone to bed.”

He means his mother and father, himself and his seven siblings. He also means the other residents of Dos Erres, all asleep, none dreaming of what was to come.

Not long before sunrise, roughly 20 Guatemalan soldiers advanced into the village on foot, all of them members of an elite combat force known as the kaibiles.

More troops, about 40, set up a security perimeter on the outskirts of the hamlet so that no one could enter — or escape.

By the time the soldiers departed the following afternoon, only four villagers were still breathing — Osorio and three others.

For many years, the massacre at Dos Erres remained a terrible secret, its grisly details buried as deeply as the corpses of those who had been mutilated and murdered. Residents of neighbouring villages suspected the truth but kept silent out of a desperate fear.

That dread was the central purpose of the whole murderous enterprise. It was the savage logic of the war, a conflict waged in large part by striking terror into the hearts and minds of the innocent.

In all, upwards of 200,000 people are believed to have perished in Guatemala’s long civil war, most of them Mayan Indians who dwelled in mud-brick villages scattered across northern Guatemala near the border with Mexico. There, it was easy for leftist rebels to proselytize for support among a population that had long been neglected or oppressed.

The army’s brutal strategy against Indian targets also reflected a deeply ingrained racism typical of Central America’s civil wars of the 1980s, in which mainly indigenous soldiers were loosed upon mainly indigenous victims. It was Indians who were forced to do most of the killing and most of the dying.

The outrages committed on Dec. 7, 1982, would become known as the massacre at Dos Erres. They are, in one sense, an old story, brutal acts that were carried out long ago. In another sense, their terror resonates and will go on reverberating as long as anyone with firsthand memories continues to draw breath.

Huddled in a church

“I heard a knock at the door,” says Osorio.

With that knock, the horrors commenced.

First, the invaders roused all the villagers. The men were hauled to the school; the women and children were taken to the church.

“In the church, there were many people,” says Osorio, who huddled there with his mother and his brothers and sisters, none of them older than 15. “Some were crying. We didn’t know what was happening.”

It was not long before they understood.

“They began to torture the men,” he says. “We could hear their cries. A man entered the church and said if we knew how to pray, we should start to pray.”

The indictment handed down against Jorge Sosa by a federal grand jury in Orange County, Calif., in September 2010 captures the barbarity of the ensuing events in just a few gruesome images.

“During the course of (their) interrogations, the special patrol proceeded to systematically kill the men, women and children at Dos Erres by, among other methods, hitting them in the head with a sledgehammer and throwing them into a well,” said the indictment. “Members of the special patrol also forcibly raped many of the women and girls at Dos Erres before killing them.”

The indictment does not mention what was done to the pregnant women, but here is a one-sentence excerpt from an account of the massacre assembled by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2009:

“The cruelty displayed by the soldiers reached the point where they caused abortions to pregnant women by beating them or even jumping on their abdomen until the fetus came out, miscarried.”

Osorio was too young to understand much of what was happening, except that it was both terrifying and deadly.

“I remember there were pregnant women,” he says. “They took them out in the direction of a well that was behind the church. When they came for my mother, we hung on to her. She pleaded, ‘For the pity of God ... ’ They gave no consideration to her words.”

The soldiers took her away, in the direction of the well, along with all her children, save one.

“All I heard was my mother crying, ‘Don’t kill my children.’”

By some trick of fate, when the screams died down, Osorio found himself in the church, alive and all but alone.

Three others would also survive the massacre, including two boys, aged 3 and 12. A fourth villager, an adult, was away from Dos Erres at the time, tending a relative’s fields, and so survived as well.

Eventually, Osorio fell asleep, curled up on one of the church’s wooden pews. It would turn out that he and the 3-year-old had been selected for adoption.

“The soldiers took us away that afternoon,” Osorio remembers. “They took us up into the mountains. We walked for two or three days. They fed us beans and tamales and honey.”

Eventually, a blue-and-white helicopter landed. It picked up the young survivors and their captors and flew to a military school in the Petén.

Eventually, Osorio was taken under the wing of an instructor at the school, a sergeant named Santos Lopez Alonso who had participated in the attack at Dos Erres. He wanted to present the child as a gift to his mother-in-law, Rufina Garcia, who had often said she would like to have a boy.

The woman apparently changed her mind, so Osorio was raised instead by Lopez Alonso and his wife, Lidia Garcia Perez, in the town of Retalhuleu in southwestern Guatemala. He was given a new name, Ramiro Fernandez Lopez Garcia, and recalls being treated less as a family member and more as an indentured servant, forced to work long hours in the family’s bakery while subject to frequent and severe beatings.

In other words, Osorio was raised by, and in many ways owed his life to, an adoptive family whose breadwinner was a man who had played a role in the murder of Osorio’s mother, father and seven siblings, not to mention their fellow villagers — an emotional, legal and psychological echo chamber that makes your head spin.

“They made me call them ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa,’” he says. “They were responsible for the death of my family, and they knew it.”

Questions and answers

The Guatemalan civil war ground on until the mid-’90s, when a truce was negotiated under international supervision. With peace came questions and, eventually, answers.

In July 1994, authorities began exhumations beneath the ground where Dos Erres had once stood. Despite repeated interruptions and bureaucratic disputes, the work proceeded until they had unearthed the skeletal remains of 162 people.

Many others may have been missed. According to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, 216 people died in the massacre.

Meanwhile, new light was being cast on those dark events from other directions.

Using DNA samples, a Guatemalan organization called Famdegua — dedicated to recovering the “disappeared” victims of the war — helped members of Osorio’s extended family find the boy who had magically survived.

“In 1999, they found my family,” says Osorio, who was by then 22.

On Feb. 20, 1999, he found himself reunited with a passel of family members, people he barely knew, relatives who had almost but not quite given him up for dead — cousins, aunts, uncles, even a grandmother and grandfather.

“It was really nice, but it was also pretty sad. I knew them and lived with them a very little while. It was happy and sad at the same time.”

The encounter was sorrowful for many reasons, not least because Osorio was obliged to leave Guatemala City just three days later to begin a journey that would take him far from his native land — to a vast northern country called Canada, where he was being admitted into a witness-protection program.

In Guatemala, the wheels of justice continued to turn slowly. In April 2000, a Guatemalan court issued warrants for the arrest of 17 individuals deemed responsible for the massacre at Dos Erres.

By this time, many of those men had fled Guatemala, including Jorge Sosa, who had absconded in 1985.

After failing to gain political asylum in the United States, Sosa travelled to Canada with his family, including his wife and two children. Canadian authorities proved to be more amenable to his claim that he was being hunted by Guatemalan rebels. They granted his application for asylum.

The family settled in Lethbridge, Alta., in 1988 and Sosa — a karate expert — opened a martial-arts school. In 1992, he became a Canadian citizen.

Later, Sosa moved back to the United States, where his civil status went through a quick succession of changes — a divorce, followed by remarriage to a Guatemala-born American. Thanks to this union, he obtained a green card in 1998. He moved to Riverside, east of Los Angeles, where he again opened a karate school. By this time, he had divorced his second wife.

In 2008, Sosa obtained U.S. citizenship. In his application, however, he failed to disclose his military career in Guatemala and made no mention of his role — which he continues to deny — in the massacre at Dos Erres. These oversights would return to haunt him.

In September 2010, a California grand jury indicted the karate instructor for citizenship fraud. By then, Sosa was in Alberta, where he had fled to avoid arrest in the United States and where he faced three different legal prospects, none of them favourable.

First, Canada could have deported Sosa to Guatemala, which was seeking his extradition on suspicion of war crimes.

Second, Canadian authorities could have invoked the legal principle of “universal jurisdiction” and tried Sosa on Canadian soil for crimes against humanity committed in Guatemala.

Or, third, Canada could have acceded to a U.S. request for Sosa’s extradition, so that he could be tried in California on far less serious charges relating to citizenship fraud.

After being arrested by Lethbridge Regional Police in January 2011, Sosa was deported to the United States last September and is now in a California jail.

The former Guatemalan army officer was convicted on two of three counts of citizenship fraud, a comparatively benign outcome considering the charges he faces in his native land.

Still, Sosa could spend up to 15 years in a federal U.S. prison, and that is justice of a sort. He is to be sentenced on Dec. 9.

“It’s a good step that he’s been found guilty on fraud charges,” says Matt Eisenbrandt of the Canadian Centre for International Justice. “But we would have liked the Canadian government to prosecute him here for war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Now 55, Sosa may well face those charges. Recently stripped of his U.S. citizenship, he will have nowhere to go but Canada or Guatemala, once he’s released from jail.

“If he wants to come here or to Guatemala, he will be tried,” says Osorio.

In Guatemala, four men have already been convicted for their part in the massacre. On Aug. 3, 2011, they were each sentenced to more than 6,000 years in prison — whatever that means, in practice — a conviction believed to mark the first time Guatemalan soldiers have been held to account for human-rights offences in nearly four decades. Efrain Rios Montt, Guatemala’s dictator in 1982 and ’83, now aged 77, faces a raft of charges relating to genocide, including his alleged involvement as mastermind of the Dos Erres killings.

‘I have no rancour’

As for this September’s trial in California, Osorio was not the only man to testify against Jorge Sosa.

Another witness for the prosecution was Santos Lopez Alonso, the man who “adopted” Osorio all those years ago in Guatemala.

Lopez Alonso was arrested in Texas in 2010 and charged with illegally re-entering the United States after having been deported. He agreed to testify against Sosa and was sentenced to time served before being transferred to California, where he was held as a material witness in Sosa’s trial.

When he thinks of Lopez Alonso now, Osorio says he feels no hostility.

“I don’t feel anything, really,” he says. “I have no rancour or hate.”

The same goes for his feelings for the other men who murdered his family and destroyed his village. Osorio would like to see them tried and punished, but the construction worker has a life of his own now.

“I have been able to make my own family,” he says, referring to his Guatemalan-born wife, their two young children, and their home in Canada. “I like it here. It’s a quiet place to live. One adapts to everything, the climate, the people. There isn’t the racism that exists in Guatemala.”

Osorio changed his legal name back to the one that was given him by his mother and father. To his mind, it represented a kind of rebirth.

“Here in Canada, I changed my name to Osorio Cristales,” he says. “This is my true name.”

Four years ago, Osorio returned to the country of his birth, to visit his new-found relatives and to go back to the village where his family was butchered on that terrible day, Dec. 7, 1982.

Guided by people from the nearby town of Las Cruces, Osorio once again set eyes upon Dos Erres — or what had once been Dos Erres.

The village had vanished without a trace.

“The only thing we could see was livestock grazing in fields. Everything else has disappeared.”

The Survivors

Ramiro Osorio Cristales

Oscar Alfredo Ramirez Castaneda

He was the second child survivor of the massacre. He was 3 years old at the time and was abducted/adopted by one of the soldiers involved in the attack.

Tranquilino Castaneda Valenzuela

Castaneda happened to be away working in a relative’s fields at the time of the attack. Thanks to DNA tests, he was reunited with his son Oscar Alfredo Ramirez Castaneda in August 2011. Until that point, he believed his wife and all nine of their children had been killed in the massacre.

Salome Armando Gomez Hernandez

Salome’s aunt lived in Dos Erres and he happened to show up at her place (to provide information about the purchase of two turkeys for Christmas) at the time of the attack. Just 12 years old, he was detained by soldiers but managed to escapeduring a momentary lapse in vigilance.

Sources: Washington Office on Latin America, El Periodico newspaper

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